Very surprised by all the positive reviews. I literally never write reviews but felt compelled to after the awful experience with VM as our estate agents. They were a main reason why we moved out of our previous flat.
The first poor experience we had with them was before we'd even signed the contract - they'd prematurely given my contact details away to a third party utility company which then proceeded to ring and email me incessantly [a clear violation of GDPR regs].
Our final poor experience with them was when we were accused of not handing the keys back at the end of the tenancy, causing a delayed return of the deposit. It was then our responsibility to scan and forward the documents that they themselves had signed when we had handed back the keys on the date they specified.
This was a theme throughout the tenancy - sending them multiple copies of documents that they had either misplaced or just not communicated with each other throughout their offices.
There were so many bad experiences, but some other notable highlights include having to get the council involved just so they'd carry out a simple health and safety repair and the fact we had to use a severely mouldy bathroom for over a year.
I have now learnt that even the landlord [who was one of these overseeing yet never present types who didn't even trust VM with a copy of their own set of keys to our flat] went with a different estate agent himself after we moved out.
A family member of mine is an estate agent and he was routinely flabbergasted at VM's sheer incompetence, so it's not just me being pedantic!
On the positive side, often the people we dealt with were pleasant enough. Hard to pin point anyone in particular as we always seemed to deal with different people each time, but for the most part they were amiable. We also got virtually all of our deposit back.
But yeah - if you want a stressful time of it all, VM are the ones for you.